I have just discovered that there is, not only, a name for the combination of the interrogative point (question mark) and the exclamation point but also a typographical symbol. The Interrobang is this combination and can be represented as ‘?!’, ‘!?’ or ‘‽’. In the past, I have used ‘?!’ because I felt that it provided an appropriate representation of questioning and excited emphasis; I prefer the exclamation after as it is the question that is being emphasized, not the emphasis being questioned. Now, however, the single typographical character provides me the opportunity to concisely express, in writing, simultaneous inquiry and surprise.
Unfortunately, although available in unicode, many fonts do not have ‘‽’ and there is no easy character combination that will lead to it.
In the world of HTML, you can often get away with ‽
our burning man camp last year was “apocalypse how?”. it is punctuation of the highest quality.
also your blog shows an error if you try to post a comment with an interrobang in it!?
I’m not entirely sure why it won’t accept the unicode interrobang character; it wouldn’t let me put it into the post either. The way that I ended up doing things was to use the HTML entity ‽.
Holy god, you have no idea how obsessed my friends and I are with the interrobang. So much so that we named our Communist-themed DI team (long story) this year “BIG RE?” — “Big Red” being a blatant reference to Cornell’s mascot, and also to the communists. But on our t-shirts, we printed the “D” as a combination hammer-and-sickle-turned-interrobang: http://rso.cornell.edu/ducttape/photos/d2k8/2008_27.jpg. Best shirt ever.
Oh and I forgot to mention, the “D” is printed with glow-in-the-dark ink.